City Relies on Veeam Backup & Replication to Support Municipal Operations and DR Strategy

Veeam Backup & Replication is the best product to use in a virtual
environment. Its vPower technology takes away any fears you have
about whether your backups will actually work and whether you’ll be
able to recover VMs quickly.

Industry:

Challenge:

Solution:

results:

City operations and services are available all day, every day

Backup speed doubles, allowing for more frequent backups and less data loss

Built-in replication supports DR strategy

About VPROF-IT:

Founded in 2011, VPROF-IT specializes in information technology solutions through consulting and technical support services. The company’s mission is to analyze the field of information technology needs and provide the right solutions at the right place and at the right time with experienced, competent, creative and innovative teams. VPROF-IT provides business partners with value-added, reliable, flexible, customer and solution- oriented tailored solutions.
For more information, go to www.vmprof-it.com.

The Business Challenge

Üsküdar is Istanbul’s oldest residential municipality with roots going back to
seventh century B.C. In 2005, government leaders developed an e-municipality
program to give citizens, businesses and other public organizations easy access
to city services. Today more than 40 processes can be accessed online, such as
renewing automobile licenses and ordering marriage certificates.

Üsküdar’s IT team supports the e-municipality program, all government operations
and 750 employees. Murat Hendem, Project and System Administrator, and his
colleagues have virtualized more than 95 percent of their data center on VMware
vSphere. All mission-critical applications and services including ArcGIS, Microsoft
Exchange Server, IIS Web Server, SharePoint, Oracle and Sybase reside on 50 virtual
machines (VMs).

Hendem and his colleagues used a legacy tool to back up their physical servers, but
they felt it didn’t offer the capabilities they need to back up and protect their VMs. It
also didn’t offer built-in functionality to replicate VMs to a disaster recovery (DR) site.
“Our city doesn’t sleep, so we must guarantee operations are always running and
residents have access to municipal services every hour of every day,” Hendem said.

“We needed a virtualization-specific backup solution that would let us recover
government systems and files quickly during an emergency situation. We also
needed replication functionality, but we would have had to purchase additional
software and agents with our legacy tool.”

The Veeam Solution

Hendem and his colleagues contacted VPROF-IT, an IT solutions firm, for
information about Veeam® Backup & Replication™ and other tools they wanted to
test. Onur Vatandas, Virtualization Architect for VPROF-IT, recommended Veeam.
“Veeam Backup & Replication is the best backup software we have used so far,” he
explained. “As a company dedicated to virtualization by VMware, we prefer Veeam
because it works like a charm in virtualized environments.”

After testing several VM backup tools, Üsküdar’s IT team selected Veeam Backup
& Replication to protect the municipality’s VMs. Built specifically for virtual
environments, it combines backup and replication in a single solution and provides
fast, flexible and reliable recovery of virtualized applications and data for VMware
vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual environments.

Veeam Backup & Replication helps Üsküdar’s IT team ensure municipal operations and services are available all day, every day. If team members encounter a problem in the data center, Veeam’s vPower™ technology lets them run a VM directly from a backup file, which enables several unique capabilities such as Instant VM Recovery. “If a VM goes down, we can restart it on any host in minutes. That’s exactly what we need to keep the city up and running,” Hendem said.

Veeam also enables the IT team to back up VMs 50 percent faster. “Since our backups are faster and more efficient, we can back up our VMs at more frequent intervals. That means less data loss during recovery,” he added.

The IT team relies on two additional capabilities in Veeam: SureBackup™ and On-Demand Sandbox. SureBackup automatically verifies the recoverability of every backup every time, which Hendem said helps everyone rest easier at night. On-Demand Sandbox lets them create VMs whenever they wish for testing purposes. “This is a very useful feature because we don’t have to shut off our systems during testing,” he said.

Veeam Backup & Replication also supports the city’s DR strategy of replicating VMs to a DR center. The IT team can achieve near-continuous data protection by updating VM replicas as often as every few minutes. Veeam doesn’t require users to purchase additional software to replicate VMs, and it doesn’t require users to license and deploy agents on hosts or VMs. Veeam Backup & Replication is licensed per CPU socket, which makes it a more cost-effective solution for Üsküdar.

The Results

City operations and services are available all day, every day If Üsküdar’s IT team encounters a problem in the data center, Hendem and his colleagues rely on Veeam’s Instant VM Recovery to restore a VM from a backup in minutes. This helps ensure city operations are available 24/7 and residents have access to services whenever they need them.

Backup speed doubles, allowing for more frequent backups and less data loss With Veeam Backup & Replication, Üsküdar’s IT team performs VM backups 50 percent faster than with the legacy backup tool. This enables more frequent backups, which means less data loss during recovery.

Built-in replication supports DR strategy Üsküdar didn’t have to purchase additional software and agents to replicate VMs to a DR center because Veeam combines backup and replication in a single, agentless solution. If the city experiences an extended power outage or catastrophic event at the primary data center, the IT team can quickly fail over to a replica.